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Examples of terse in a Sentence

Everything about him is tidy, from his terse wit to the flecks of gray hair that fall in precise iterations around the edges of his scalp. —Devin Gordon, Newsweek, 29 July 2002

… Johnston stays bolted to the wheelhouse floor, wrestling the helm and jotting down notes in the ship log. His entries are terse, bullet descriptions of the unending chaos outside. —Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm, 1997

This vicious cycle was captured succinctly in Gandhi's terse warning that an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. —David McCabe, Commonweal, 11 Apr. 1997

She accepts the caller's terse expression of sympathy and duly expresses in return her appreciation for that unenviable bit of message-bearing. —John Barth, Harper's, January 1994

She gave me a few terse instructions and promptly left the room.

could tell from his terse replies to my questions that he was in no mood to talk

Recent Examples of terse from the Web

Mariota was just somewhat terse in his responses, which is understandable given that his two second-half interceptions led to a loss that took Tennessee out of first place in the AFC South.

As the Washington Post reports: [Tillerson’s] comments upset Trump and several senior aides, and set off a cascade of emails and phone calls that ended with a terse statement from press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'terse.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.